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The Wandering Wraith
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About the game
You play a wraith, a pale little ghost with big hollow eyes, who wants nothing more than to go back to the grave where he belongs. The way there is a long walk through a gloomy, hand-drawn world: grey hills and bare trees, drifting fog, deep pits and thorns waiting at the bottom. The screen is almost black and white, with the wraith himself as the brightest thing on it, glowing like a lantern, so you can always tell where to look.
It is a platformer in the classic sense. You run, you jump, you climb walls where the ground lets you, and you learn the shape of each landscape by falling into it a few times. Scattered along the way are crystals, seventy-five in all, which you can ignore or hunt down. When you finally get home, the ending counts how long it took, how many crystals you found and how many times you died.
Mateusz Tomczyk made The Wandering Wraith for js13kGames 2019, where the whole game, zipped, had to fit in 13 kilobytes. The scenery, the wraith and the gallows at the start are all drawn by code or in small vector shapes, and the sound is generated on the fly.
Playing it here
Click Play and wait for the title to load. If a menu shows, press Continue (or New game). Your progress is saved in this browser, so you can close the page and come back to the same place later. Press Esc at any time for the menu.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Left / Right arrow | walk |
| Space | jump |
| Arrow towards a wall | climb it, when the wall allows |
| Esc | pause and open the menu (Continue / New game) |
A few things worth knowing
Fall carefully. Not every drop is safe, and the spikes at the bottom of some pits are real. Look over the edge before you jump when you can.
Dying is cheap. The game saves your position as you go and puts you back there, and the ending screen keeps count of your deaths, so there is no reason to play it safe all the time.
Is it scary? It is dark and melancholic, with a gallows silhouette near the start, but there is no gore and nothing jumps out at you.
Credits and licence
The Wandering Wraith was created by Mateusz Tomczyk and released under the MIT licence. The sound effects use ZzFX by Frank Force (MIT). The licence texts are linked from this page, and the source code is on GitHub and in the js13kGames repository.